How Zohran Mamdani mobilized NYC’s indie rock community

Group chats all over New York City lit up on the night of July 24, 2025. At the start of the year, Zohran Mamdani had been an unfamiliar yet inviting face popping up on Instagram and TikTok feeds across the five boroughs. Gradually, and then suddenly, he was everywhere. At the end of May, I picked up two blue and yellow Zohran for New York City posters in Union Square. An older man sitting on a tree guard near 13th Street saw me carrying them and said, “This guy — can he really freeze the rent? Make the buses free? I don’t know.” My mom, who was with me, replied, “Well, he’s going to try.”

When Mamdani won the primary on July 24 the city felt electric. It turned out my transplant friends, who I’d been urging to change their registration since before November ‘24, had actually voted in the New York mayoral race. This seemed monumental. Beyond the thrilling prospect of a youthful Democratic Socialist mayor — he just turned 34 — people were actively engaging in local politics, caring about what happened in the big, awesome, complex, overwhelming city in which we live.

This was the atmosphere when musicians and friends Rachel Brown of Water From Your Eyes and Charlie Dore-Young of Sweet Baby Jesus started planning the Indie Rockers for a Better New York, a Rallying for Zohran benefit show series. Brown and Dore-Young — who first met at Palisades, a beloved Bushwick venue that closed in 2016, a decade ago — have witnessed profound changes in the city’s art scene. Not only Palisades, but The Glove, Shea Stadium, Silent Barn, Death By Audio, Glasslands, Secret Project Robot, and various other consequential N.Y.C community music venues have closed, while rent and grocery prices skyrocketed. Brown and Dore-Young are among a sizable group of N.Y.C.-based musicians and artists who are seeing Mamdani as someone who will revitalize the scene once more — or at least, are hopeful he’ll make it easier for there to be one.

“I think probably like 90% of the money I’ve ever made in my life has gone to rent,” Brown tells me over the phone, on break from a long Water From Your Eyes tour. The most exciting thing about Mamdani’s platform, they say, is its roots in making life easier for people. “An affordable New York would be so awesome.”

Both Brown and Dore-Young told me that, until learning of Mandani’s campaign, they hadn’t been excited politically since Bernie Sanders. But Mamdani’s affordability platform, and the way he seemed to be genuinely concerned about the lives of New Yorkers, fueled their fire once again. “It’s not like he has a bunch of big donors that he’s making promises to,” Brown adds. “The promises he’s making are to the people who actually live here.”

For the Brooklyn-raised Dore-Young, who’s been a critical force in New York DIY for years and has experience organizing DSA benefits, the shows were a way to express that excitement, and to “help connect people with each other, galvanize.” The four benefit shows, from August 24th to September 3rd, were held at Union Pool, Honey’s, TV Eye, and Nightclub 101 (where, notably, another artist-studded fundraising event was held in March). They passed out voter registration and volunteer forms, and the bills featured local and out-of-state artists like Christian Lee Hutson, Katy Kirby, Palehound, Wild Pink, and Gift, with support from Antics Mag, Perfectly Imperfect, and Chapo Trap House.

Brown was worried attendees would be more caught up with the music than the politics, but there was a steady flow of sign-ups. After three out of four sold-out shows, all proceeds went to on-the-ground organizations the Sameer Project and NYC Migrant Solidarity, as well as the Mamdani support PAC New Yorkers for Lower Costs. It was in the effort, as Dore-Young puts it, of “doing something for the greater movement that this campaign represents.”

The shows mobilized other segments of N.Y.C.’s artistic community. Kristine Michelsen Correa, a creative director who led the tabling charge and hawked black-metal font Zohran hats at the events, told me that she’s sold over 500 hats in five weeks. Made in Mexico City with streetwear brand Sacrifice, the hats are meant as a playful way to attract voters and for Mamdani volunteers (of which there are reportedly about 75,000) to show community pride; the black-metal script is a nod to the genre’s historical alignment with social activism in Mexico.

“I wanted to show that we are connected beyond the five boroughs, across our borders,” Michelsen Correa says. That the hats have proliferated mostly due to word-of-mouth and one-on-one interaction is “an amazing example of how people can connect over an important moment in our political history in New York.” Her involvement in the music aspect of it all, which began with the indie rock benefit shows, came about the same way: noticing “a lot of musicians using their voice” in support of Mamdani. Most recently, Michelsen Correa sold hats at musician Fenne Lily’s show at Nightclub 101 after the singer’s partner had seen the hats on the subway.

“The Zohran Effect is so strong,” Lily says. Though the British native can’t vote in New York, she felt drawn to being involved in some way, if only because she’s experienced how the quality of live music has declined since COVID, she says. “Venues shut down, the cost of living went up, streaming is a nightmare, Spotify is run by the worst guy ever. But then Zohran came along and it was like, Someone has practical, kind ways to make the future not a scary place.”

Mamdani hasn’t detailed specific policy plans or made any promises when it comes to arts funding or nightlife; mostly, he’s made comments about the intrinsic link between economics and art-making, and his belief in the value of arts accessibility. When he was endorsed by musicians union AFM Local 802 in July, he said, “Art can’t just be a luxury for the few. That requires a city where artists can actually afford their rent, groceries, childcare and transit.” (Notably, he’s the son of filmmaker Mira Nair, and lived a previous life as a rapper.)

The closest he’s gotten to an official policy statement was at BRIC’s Arts & Culture Mayoral Forum in February, where he said, as mayor, he’s committed to “understanding art beyond simply tourism, beyond the fiscal impacts,” and that he would bring an administration that values art-based community organizations as much as their religious counterparts. But this was enough to gain the faith of artist Salman Toor, model and activist Bethann Hardison, and Zoe Saldaña, who all commented on the post. And Mamdani has since also been endorsed by the Actors’ Equity Association, and called “the Downtown Scene’s pick for New York City Mayor” by ArtNet.

Dore-Young acknowledges that Mamdani’s election won’t bring solutions for all the problems that ail the city’s arts scene, but “I think [his election] is an extremely necessary first step for our survival. For native New Yorkers who have stuck it out here, they’re struggling and they think about how they might have to leave. It seems like this guy wants to help us. We might have to fight him, but I’d much rather it be him than literally anyone else.”

At an MJ Lenderman show at Brooklyn Steel in April, Mamdani made an appearance, and, Brown recalls, “I have never heard people clap and scream that loudly for any band. But probably most people at the MJ Lenderman show, at the indie rock benefit shows, at the Fenne Lily show, at Rash Bar last week, etcetera, were likely to vote for Mamdani anyway. What feels different, special, rare, is how his messaging has resonated beyond the local community. This summer alone, Mamdani’s surprised Lucy Dacus’s audience at All Things Go, went to Madison Square Garden for Wu-Tang Clan, pulled up to BAYO Festival at Barclays, and held a Trans Community Town Hall with Ceyenne Doroshow at Ridgewood dance hub Nowadays. There was a Rave 4 Zohran at Market Hotel, a Rock ‘n’ Roll and Rent Control at Xanadu, and a Change Becomes Us benefit at Hyperballad.

Somehow, it doesn’t feel dumb to be, earnestly, hopeful— and in a city renowned for its attitude and notoriously bad mayors, no less. Voter turnout for the primary was the highest it’s been in over a decade.“Even people who don’t believe in voting are like, ‘Okay, this guy is talking about protecting trans people. He’s talking about protecting immigrants. He’s talking about protecting the disenfranchised people of the city,’” Dore-Young noted.

“New York is really New York because of the people who live here,” Brown adds — an obvious statement and yet it bears repeating, needs protecting. “It really feels like Zohran and his campaign are creating a New York that’s an actual place where people live and know each other.”